


The World is a Kaleidoscope.

by bilsunderooks



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Claustrophobia, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Magic, Near Death Experiences, The de Rolo family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-08-10 15:20:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7850206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bilsunderooks/pseuds/bilsunderooks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was something stuck in his teeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World is a Kaleidoscope.

**Author's Note:**

> A short, Percy centric study with very little plot exploring the concept of magic and legacy in the de Rolo family that also turned into a 'what if Orthax never left' idea that took wings.
> 
> Many thanks to [charmedward](http://archiveofourown.org/users/charmedward/pseuds/charmedward) and for her superb and precise beta work.

There was something stuck in his teeth.

It dug harshly into the gum, between his wisdom and molar, when he sighed smoke into the air and worked his tongue around words. He emerged into consciousness, into a black world that smelled of dust. He wasn't surprised when he swallowed and tasted ash and acid, wasn't sure what he was supposed to be expecting: Percy the smoke monster, with ash for saliva, and tar for blood.

It was like something from Cassandra’s fairy tales; of the monsters that wandered the woods and sought help from unwitting travellers only to devour them when their prey least expected it.

Monsters who consume and are consumed by thoughts of that which makes them monsters.

Percy remembered the ink on his sister’s hands, the corner of her mouth, the smudges on her jaw and cheekbone as she talked about monsters needing their own stories. All the bad stuff, the stuff that caused the nasty taste in your mouth when you think about them. All the stuff about redemption too, and that some monsters needed to work to some goodness to make their struggle for humanity matter. But then she also said that monsters never really deserved a happy ending, with a clink of her tongue and distaste knotting the lines of her brow- the power of her hatred for things that caused pain mindlessly.

He never thought much of her stories until he became that monster.

Trapped in a cave after a particularly nasty rockslide cut him and Keyleth off from the rest of the group, he couldn’t help but think that it was a fitting end for him.

He tried to blink away the blood blocking his vision and coughed. His head hurt and he let out a moan. It was dark and hot there, airless in the worrying way that made the hair on his forearms stand up. He reached with outstretched hands and touched the rock. His glasses were long broken, shattered between rocks, the sound sharp and distinct before he had blacked out. His face was naked without them. He felt covered in dust, the grime starting to soak with the sweat under his collar.

Keyleth lay unconscious by his side and hadn’t yet woken at the many times he tried to shake her arm. He touched her cheek, laid his head against her chest to search for her heart beat. She still breathed and he had to swallow around the sudden lump in his throat that burned neck muscles and eyes. She smelled of burnt leaves and blood.

He jolted around, trying to see any light or outline.

“Vax! Grog!” He yelled, heard its echo through the cave. Checked the earring and encountered buzzing static. He called out everyone else’s name, then again in the confines of his own mind. Prayed.

Nothing.

He didn’t know if smoke demon possession actually caused claustrophobia, but Percy was starting to hate the telltale symptoms that would invade his senses at inopportune times like this; light-headedness blurring the edges of his emotions; sharp cutting through his heart strings until it felt ragged with distress; lungs tight; mouth dry; the overwhelming crush of panic. And the pain in his tooth was starting to double, until it was a constant throbbing pressure at the back of his head, the area often under stress after long hours in his workshop hunched over Bad News or Vex’s arrows.

It was so very dark, and the makeshift cavern was very small.

He drew in a breath and pushed it all aside until it all became bearable, feeling very human in that moment, something that’s occurred regularly since the day he met Vox Machina.

He took initiative and pulled Keyleth’s headpiece off, sighed in relief that it was still intact, then shrugged his coat off, balled it up and shoved it under her head.

“It’s going to be alright,” he told her. “I’ll figure something out, something insanely clever and probably not good, and we’ll get out of here, and you’ll be awake to see it happen, or the others will have found us. I promise you.” His hands shook when he took her pulse again and his wheezes trembled in the air. “We’ll get out of this.”

Realistically, if his rapid calculations were right, they had about an hour of air left.

He closed his eyes and thought of the black powder in his coat pocket, barely full. He didn’t want to risk firing Bad News into the rock in case of ricochet, or worsening their already precarious position, trapped as they are under heavy rock. Didn’t even think he had enough elbow room to wield it.

Mother would have known what to do.

_As a child he often had night terrors that would wake his parents and Julius. While Julius and father had checked under the bed and in the wardrobe, mother was the one who took him into her arms, wrapped him in her purple shawl that smelled of roses, and hummed tunelessly into his ear, stroking his knuckles and wrist until he stopped trembling. Vesper would flit into and out of sight by the door, glaring sullenly at the array of candles that towered over his late night reading and tool box, the table with the small, half-formed gadgets. Cassandra a prominent lump of blankets at the foot of the bed, like a sleepy cat. Mother would then pick up each gadget and arrange them into a tidy line between Percy’s bed and the door, the ultimate defence._

_It would then devolve into just the three of them curled up together in a pocket of time where no monsters would invade the soft orange glow of the bedroom walls, the dusky red curtains that lined his bed, the purple velvet swirls that dissected the blood red bedspread._

_His hair was stroked, temple kissed; his mother whispered to him about heroes slaying dragons with only a sword in their hands and friends by their side, about the time she saved a spoilt young Lord from a pack of hungry wolves with her trusty mace, about how her armour shined in the sun and crossbow whistled in the air, about the children and mothers and merchants and wise women she saved in times of greatest danger. About how bravery in times of crisis came in fits and starts and just needed a match to ignite it and explode outwards like a firework._

_“Now Percival, what do we do when we’re feeling trapped and scared?” She’d said._

_“Tell ourselves everything is fine, we’re going to think our way out of this.” He’d told her with all the certainty a six year old credited to a mother who smelled of roses; the tendency to keep her mace propped by her bedroom door and her crossbow hidden under father's study desk._

_“And go ‘boom’, right Percival?”_

_“Go boom.”_

“It’s going to be fine,” he said, now a man and only certain in his own pride and the loss of a familial love well known, desperate, unmoored. “I have to think my way out of this.”

But there are no gadgets at hand to be lined up like soldiers at a battlefield, no mother to stroke his hair or clean his glasses for him, no father to knock on the bed frame three times and light a solitary candle to illuminate the orange walls.

He’d just have to make do.

Decided, out went the bag of black powder hidden in his left coat pocket and he shook it out into a gentle arch across the floor, near the rock line, careful to keep it away from Keyleth’s feet. Bag pocketed once more, he then gathered her into his arms and edged away as much as he possibly could, until hard stone was digging bruises into his shoulder, his forehead. Keyleth’s head tucked under his chin, a strand of hair tickling his clavicle, her spine a hot line down his chest and stomach, used his free arm to lift her legs to fold them back until her left knee brushed the wall. He then hefted her sideways until the wall supported her lax frame, gathered her hair behind her ear.

He turned back and took another couple of hot breaths that tasted similar to Scanlan’s hot springs.

_Julius made clocks. They were never wonderfully intricate things worthy to sell at the Merchant’s Guild, or grabbed enough attention for Julius to acquire commissions. They were far too practical if possessing a peculiar abstraction that both caught and repulsed the eye. The cogs were small and unpolished, the hands crude and twisted, the face yellow and gleamed dully. Julius would spend hours on those clocks, tucked away in his room or on the garden’s terrace surrounded by dahlias and hydrangeas._

_The thing about those clocks was that they never stayed small._

_A finished clock was always abandoned to collect dusky hues in the shadow of the terrace’s cover, away from the wood platform and situated with the plants, left without ever feeling the touch of its creator ever again. Yet somehow the faces seemed to shift and melt into the foliage until they expanded, the cogs started to gleam, and the hands warped at the same rate as the face. The numbers would grow vines, and pop out tiny sweet peas, and the frame of the clock patchwork viridescent. He once thought he saw a clock face framed by dahlia petals, as if it had become one with the flower. Percy never knew if it was sentient growth full of unknown secrets, or if Julius wasn’t playing some trick on them all. If asked Julius shrugged. ‘They’re just clocks. My time is better spent making new ones instead of fixing the old.’ Percy left such discussions with mounting frustration. Still the clocks sat in the garden and breathed into the leaves; watching, waiting with every tick and bloom of purple petals._

_Their attention was a tremour that worked its way through Percy’s shoulders and into his hands. An unsettling grasp of safety gone mostly unchecked if Percy didn’t pay any mind to it._

He never really thought, looking back, of the way Cassandra would sometimes doodle birds on the margins of her stories. Fat birds with inky wings and sharp beaks. They were so life-like in their forms and were usually drawn poised and alert, as if about to take sudden flight. Always waiting for a chance to flee the pages.

_Cassandra liked to use the blue ink from father’s study. Once, one of Cassandra’s sheets had been left on the desk of his workshop and, illuminated by the lamp light, out of the corner of his eye, one particularly fat bird seemed to shuffle its wings and fluff out its feathers. When he turned his head to further inspect the bird watched him but made no more movements. He remembered how sharp those eyes were and thinking, the words coming into his head like someone else was speaking them; far far away like a whisper bouncing off glass, whispers cupped into hands or thrown down wells; the distant howl of the wind as it gutted a fireplace; ‘nothing is ever trapped for long’._

_He’d give anything to have one of her inked pages folded in his coat or wedged between the rocks by his side._

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. His feet flexed inside his boots. He rested his elbows on his knees before his hand found his mouth. The fingers unerringly brushed the source of pain and he hesitated for a moment before hooking a nail into a sharp corner and pulled, lungs expanding like he is breathing through a vacuum.

_Vesper sometimes carried fruit in a basket over to the pond in the garden. The pond had several fish swimming in its depth, tiny flashes of silver and orange flitting around and under lily pads. Following some circuitous pattern unknown to them all, except perhaps Vesper. No one even knew where they came from; they were a mystery that fueled the cooking staff’s gossip and bewitched the young stable hand who once offered Vesper an apple._

_Percy had often counted the fish with Oliver and Whitney as they all lounged by the pool’s side every spring and summer. Trousers rolled to their knees and forearms bared to the sun’s rays, their toes dipped into the weeds and long grass and the fish would swim up to curl around them like steam from one of father’s cups of tea. Sometimes there were ten, other times seven. Once there had been twenty, and it had seemed like the pond was teeming with silver and orange bodies. When Vesper thought no one was looking she would take a fork out of her fruit basket, or the family picnic basket, and use it to stir the water. Under the morning or evening light the fork would slip from her hand and shimmer before it swam away, fledging fins and tail unfurling and stretching in newfound joy._

_Vesper inherited their father’s secretive smile, the one that teased at a dimple with smug satisfaction._

_Ludwig also inherited that de Rolo smile, only he saved it whenever he spoke of his imaginary friend. If you wanted to know where a specific de Rolo was in the castle, ask Ludwig. If you wanted to know where the last scone vanished to, ask Ludwig. The stable boy has run off with the baker’s son? Ludwig. The Baroness is actually a famous jewel thief in Emon? Ludwig. Oliver stole Cassandra’s favourite doll? That one was mother, because she had a terrifyingly iron-clad grasp of her children’s devious plots and wasn’t above bribing Ludwig with extended bedtimes if it meant she got a one up on Lady Katriona Prunella Hartfordshire DuPont IV’s secret carrot cake recipe for the annual Whitestone Baking Contest._

_Where there was a secret, Ludwig knew it hours before you did. If asked, even under pain of confiscated medical books or Whitestone’s sweet store’s finest lemon drops, Ludwig would say his imaginary friend told him._

_Secrets were as much a part of the de Rolo legacy as the line of their nose and stressed induced white hair before they even turned thirty._

_The library had been useless in the pursuit of genealogical secrets, and Percy had been forced to prowl through grandfather’s restricted section like a disappointed mistress._

Percy pulled and pulled at the piece, sighed in satisfaction when he felt a slight give, a shiver of a wiggle. His mouth slowly filled with blood, hot under his tongue.

He thought of Cassandra’s drawing, of Vesper’s metal fish. He thought of them through the pain, through the fear and wondered why the de Rolo name was so cursed it overrode any blessings the family had been granted (seven children, a blissfully happy couple, a stable home with loving people and green fields). He had once tried to lift Vesper's fish out of the pond and they only fell back into the water as a dessert spoon. He attempted to open Julius’ clocks to inspect their workings and they had stayed shut, the petals and leaves grew shrivelled. Cassandra's birds never moved for him when he shook a page. He never knew where the twins were. Ludwig’s imaginary friend never spoke to anyone but him, and seemed to take delight in disturbing Vesper’s fish, Father’s ravens, and stirring town gossip with suspicions of ghosts.

The only thing that ever wanted to work for Percy were his guns, and none of the pieces ever danced for him or sent him a saucy wink, gears never churned and bullets never quivered as if ready for flight. He assembled and experimented but nothing truly extraordinary ever happened even after his family’s corpses lay underground.

He was always left waiting, greedy with it even as he tried to ignore how his father had once glanced at him, a raven in his hand with its head cocked and beady eyes sharp, and said ‘Tell him he’s being insufferably rigid, Percival’ before offering him a bountiful three crackers and the raven snatched them up with a happy caw, and his father rolled his eyes.

_Oliver and Whitney acted as one voice and never stayed in one space for long. They constantly ran through the castle as if being chased by monsters, whistling and laughing as they darted through room after room after hall after staircase. Playing hide and seek was torture, and he and the others quickly learned that if there was a room with a mirror you can never hope to catch either twin. Percy would stare in his bedroom mirror and catch flashes of Whitney’s eyes or Oliver’s coat lining, a green hair ribbon, gangly boyish knuckles, wicked smiles, a kaleidoscope of teasing images building up to crest into a big reveal only to vanish again; reappear as smug smiles at the dinner table, companionable elbows into sides and discrete high fives._

_Mother walked through their home like she wasn’t part of it, she walked through it with her hand tight on the banister, her feet sure as her skirts swirled and her neck stretched regal. She walked like their home was a creature that she alone had tamed. She knew where every weapon was in the house, every defence, every safeguard. Yet there were no secrets with mother; she was entirely honest and smiled with her whole body, with her small nose and blue eyes and breeches; loved to sew and ride side-saddle on her horse while shooting pigeons down with her crossbow; cooked amazing pastries and stews but couldn’t sing a tune._

_Her hands were lined and scarred and there was a knot of tissues where her neck joined her shoulder. She taught her girls how to shoot an apple and wield a sword, then turned around and did the same with the boys. She kissed father languidly by the library fireplace and forever fussed over his tie. She kissed Oliver’s cut knees and slapped Cassandra’s hands when they inched towards sugared apples, tickled Vesper when she least expected it, picked flowers with Whitney and played polo with Julius._

_Percy she taught how to fight._

_“Percival. What do we say when we’re scared and think we’re alone? When we don’t have anything magical to protect us, and even our wits are a bit useless?” His mother had said while wiping away the tears from his face and rubbed at a nasty split that itched as it healed, a remnant of the half-orc’s fist, with a long nose and green skin and skinny teenage frame that had tried to grab Whitney on market day when she was chasing reflections, soft and pretty in her new green dress inlaid with silver embroidery._

_“We’re de Rolos. We protect our own.”_

_“We are the last line of defence.”_

_“Because the legacy must endure, no matter the cost,” he’d finished for her._

_“Good. Now next time,” she tapped the splint on his hand, “Don’t tuck your thumb under your fingers.”_

Percy’s last defence was this: the cancerous scar of Orthax that pulsed under his ribs like rotten peach flesh, like algae thickened water, like a forest fire set to ignite and burn the world down. He shifted until his body covered Keyleth’s, free hand resting on his holster.

His vision started to blur and he panted with significant difficulty.

“If you had any sense, Orthax, you’ll emerge now,” he said around his fingers. The threat seemed the hum in the air, reverberate into the cracked stone. “Hold on just a moment, Keyleth.”

He swallowed around a dry throat, fingers twitched against leather.

Monsters who consume and are consumed by thoughts of that which makes them monsters only endured in stories because they had nothing else to lose.

“Keyleth, Percy! Shit! Can you hear us?” Scanlan’s voice came through the earpiece, sharp with sudden clarity that almost made Percy jump.

“We’re coming for you, just hold on!” Vex also yelled, much closer, an intimate caress along the shell of his ear.

Too late.

Percy exhaled, did a final tug at his mouth, and he erupted into smoke, the terrifying snarl of Orthax raging into being as he filled the cavern, enveloped Percy and Keyleth, and it was endless, like the heart of an exploding star.

Orthax roared in triumph.

Percy snapped out his sharp shooter, aimed, pulled back the safety.

Prayed.

“Boom.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title take from Brookfield's "Kaleidescope", specifically 'The world is a kaleidescope/and I'm not seeing right.' Listened to it while editing my first draft and was surprised by how much the lyrics fit.


End file.
